Sony aims to become world's third largest phone maker, grab 20% of Android sales

Sony Mobile Communications is a brand new company formed after the Sony Ericsson split, but it has the Sony brand and the ambition to become the world’s third largest phone maker “not in 10 years’ time, but a lot sooner.” Currently, Sony Mobile has a 6.5% to 7% of the market by value.

Sony head of sales and marketing Dennis van Schie hopes the company would be able to capture 20% of all Android sales, currently dominated by Samsung, with a huge combined presence of ‘other’ Chinese white box makers.

All of this will allegedly be possible because of the huge synergies emerging after the Sony Ericsson split. The Swedish Japanese joint venture existed from 2001 to 2011, and brought some iconic handsets, but could not leverage Sony’s key technologies.

The situation has changed radically since the new company was formed.

“Even if we thought we were part of Sony, all the hard-core technological assets that were available—applications, services, the hardware, like the sensors—were not really made available to us,” van Schie said. “It was not a competitive advantage at that time. Now it is. It clearly is.”

The executive said a screen made for Sony’s TV business “was optimized for mobile” just six months later. Also, Sony Mobile now allegedly has early access to its parent company’s camera sensors used by many in the industry.

Dennis van Schie

“Where we leverage—and this is a big change from the past—the sales and marketing infrastructure of Sony. For example, in India. I was responsible for product development on the technological side at Sony Ericsson. We had a team of 25, 30 people, and to get to the mom-and-pop stores out there in a massive, complex and vast country like India is very risky.”

With those R&D and sales synergies, Sony Mobile might well achieve its goal. It’s scored solid growth in the past few quarters, and in just a couple of weeks we’ll see how it did in the third quarter of 2013.

12.Dastrix (unregistered)

So true mate! Sony makes better phones than Samsung for sure. I wish Sony beats Samsung one day. It's enervating to see that innovative companies like Sony do not get the recognition they deserve in the market while Plastisung eats up the good OEMs. Now Sony and others suffer because of that... It's really sad that HTC is on downfall. Where's our world heading?

It's time for Sony to stoop down and copy from poopsung for the first time- increase your marketing budget. More importantly, they need to have their phones offered by more carriers in the US. It's a huge market they can't ignore anymore if they seriously want that much market share. Good luck.

They certainly shouldn't copy design, but marketing, yes, prices, yes, and they NEED to stop ignoring the US. I honestly find this article kind of funny because as much as I like Sony, they just aren't doing this right...

Aww - number of patents? Educate yourself on patents first. Companies like poopsung set an annual patent target for its employees and end up with a pile of sh*t every year. Their patents are so useless that that can't even defend against Apple that started making phones few years ago and Samsung's R&D budget is a bigger joke that mostly includes the cost of making dumb manufacturing factories. Wise up, little fool.

IMO, There's nothing wrong with Sony's UI. But I hope they will change their boot up animation, I'm not saying that it's bad, but I just want to see something new. I hope they will make a new boot up animation in Android 4.4 KitKat update.

So now we know it probably happened like Microsoft with Nokia: Sony made the joint venture with Ericsson, but their plan was, from the start, to buy the whole business.
That's why they didn't give SE their best technologies: they weren't interested on SE succes. Quite the contrary: they were probably hoping for a failure.
Unfortunately, there were some smart guys in Ericsson, who even managed to survive the iphone earthquake. So it took them 10 years to buy them...

Negative commander. They made this pact way back before modern smartphones. The deal was great for the pre-smartphone era as it made them one of the best in the phone business. Unfortunately the limitations did not translate well to the modern smartphone game and actually haemorrhaged them. So now they have adapted it to the new model (after a very big restructuring of the main company) and are hopefully back in action.

+ lag + bad viewing angles + horrible camera post-processing. I had my fair share of negative Xperience with the Z so I know exactly what I'm talking about, it's cool to have waterproof coating, but there are faster, smoother and far better handsets out there with more screen dominance and better utilization of Sony's excellent Exmor RS.

Good luck and hope Sony succeed but to be honest, 20% ! I dont think so. Sony products are always more expensive than others and Competition will be even harder as Chinese maker like Hwawei, lenovo, zte and others are coming out with cheaper phones with great features. And Indian companies also.

BIG FAN of Samsung Here! And I Admit, I like Sony Phones too. They have the "PREMIUM LOOK" and their Designs are Awesome. :) I just Love SONY AND SAMSUNG! If ever My Dear Samsung Dropped to Number 2, I hope that Sony will be the Number 1! SONY SAMSUNG FOR THE WIN!

how the heck they aim to be worlds 3rd largest phone maker...when they dont even make all of their flagship/top of the line smartphones available to all u.s carriers, needless to mention worldwide? the xperia z i only see available with tmobile...and the xperia z ultra is not even listed in any of the big 4 u.s. carriers.

if sony wants to be as big as they want to be, then they need to start making their smartphones much more available worldwide than it is right now...cause man, i'd like to get a hold of the xperia z ultra to use with tmobile.

and no, im not looking to buy an xperia z ultra anywhere else other than at my local tmobile store...ive done that with the mega 6.3 that i bought from att...i had it unlocked, only to find out that it doesnt do 4g/4g lte with my tmobile sim card, it only uses edge, and its freeekin slow. i sold it the next day.

I doubt tmobile store will have it. You can get it from newegg. C6806 model will support both Tmob/ATT LTE &3G and c6802 will support both carriers 3G. If you switch your sim cards frequently, stay away from carrier phones. They are intentionally crippled to not work on other networks. Sometimes the radio is missing the support, sometimes you have to flash the baseband to make it fully work on other carriers. Becomes a nightmare if you switch sim cards frequently. Unlocked phones are the way to go, also costs less than carrier phones (assuming you're paying the no-contract price)

Sadly I doubt they will be able to increase their share even to 10%. And I don't mean in a short time. I mean even in a 5yr period...

Why?

First... Well at least in USA is a miracle to find a Sony phone that works in Verizon, Sprint, or even T-mobile. Some of them works in T-mobile but only in 2G speed (if you can call 2G a speed since 2G is basically useless), since most of them works in 1,900MHZ frequency only and T-mobile network needs 1,700MHZ phones to work at 3G. Most, if not all, only works in 4G if you are using AT&T network.

Second... Sony phones are usually expensive. If they want to sell more phones than the competition they have to sell them much lower than them. Not just at the same price.

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